Between 1907 and 1910, Densmore travelled through the settler states of Minnesota and Wisconsin to “capture” music from the Leech Lake, White Earth, Lac du Flambeau, Nett Lake and Red Lake Ojibwe-Anishinaabe communities. More than a century later, Lyz Jaakola, known by her community at the Fond du Lac reservation as ‘the lady who knows how to sing’ and Tim Powell, director of Educational Partnerships with Indigenous Communities at the Penn Language Center, collaborated to thoughtfully repatriate these songs. These songs had been circulated without much care for what happened to them through the Federal Cylinder Project launched by the Library of Congress in 1979. In 2014, Jaakola and Powell worked with Larry Anderson, president of the Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College, to initiate a project titled “Teaching Ojibwe Values through Stories and Songs: Building a Digital Repository at the Ojibwemowining Center.” The following is an abridged version of this story with takeaways for effective community-based repatriation. For a more thorough retelling by Lyz Jaakola and Tim Powell themselves, please read “‘The Songs Are Alive’: Bringing Frances Densmores’s Recordings Back Home to Ojibwe Country” (2018). 

In the late 1990’s Lyz Jaakola was given a shoebox of original wax cylinders and cassette tape copies (“dubs of dubs”) recorded by Densmore. Knowing that there were Midewiwin songs (medicine songs) on the tapes, Jaakola was initially hesitant to listen. She did not want to listen to something sacred that was not meant for her. Over the course of a few years, Jaakola started to listen to the tapes, a process she describes as “spiritual russian roulette.” She consulted elders on what to do, learned more about Midewiwin to become worthy of accessing the medicin songs and shared the recordings and contextual knowledge with Anishnaabe culture-bearers in regional communities. 

These songs took on new forms as they returned home to their communities. A young culture-bearer from Lac du Flambeau memorized the songs and shared stories, passed down through oral tradition, of the individuals who were recorded. These songs are now regularly performed at gatherings and are seeds for new compositions made in the style of Anishinaabe music at the time Densmore studied them in 1907-1910. In addition to organizing the songs onto a digital database, Jaakola used the non-sacred songs to create a curriculum for public schools in the state of Minnesota. Other examples of re-contextualizing these songs include an iPad app, “Honour Water,” which encourages people to learn Ojibwe language and songs and audio pieces recorded by students and children for an exhibit at the Duluth Children's Museum. 

Jaaokola and Powell worked within the framework of an Anishnaabe definition of music. They treated the songs not as artifacts or objects of study, but as living spiritual beings that can take on new, potent forms. For example, Jaakola respected the sacredness of the Midewiwin songs and did not listen to them until she was ready. She also expressed humility and a community-oriented mindset in seeking the advice of the elders, making offerings, abiding cultural protocols associated with the songs and sharing them  with other Anishnaabe people. This process of repatriating reflects the cultural values embodied in the songs: Gwayakochiegewin “doing things the right way” and Bimaadiziwin, “a healthy way of life.”